On Friday, June 8 2001, "Clive D.W. Feather" wrote to "Jonathan Lennox, tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov" saying:
Jonathan Lennox said:
One of the major shortcomings of the current time zone API defined by ISO C [...] Therefore, I've written up a proposal (attached) for a thread-safe API for time zone functions.
Please don't.
There are a number of known deficiencies with the C time stuff, and it really needs redesigning from scratch with a solid set of concepts behind it. For various reasons I'm supposed to be organising a group to do that, but it's way way down my list of priorities.
Any new design will, of course, need to address these issues, but I don't think there's any point in doing this sort of ad hoc work to solve just one item.
Well, this is the thing. I need C-based thread-safe time zone functions for a project I'm working on. I figured a) I'd base my code on tzcode, b) it'd be sensible to contribute my modifications back to tzcode, and c) it'd be good to have a sensible API for my code. I don't have the time or experience to do a full re-write of the C time stuff, though. I've tried to model my (revised) API (to be sent out to the list shortly) on a subset and simplification of Markus Kuhn's proposed time zone model, to keep upward extensibility to a full, sensible API. Given that I need to write this code anyway, I don't see any benefit (to me or the community) from keeping it private. -- Jonathan Lennox lennox@cs.columbia.edu